Substation Automation (“SA”) systems can supervise, monitor, protect and control the substation. This can be done by protection and control devices allocated to the substation bays and primary equipment, and station level gateways and Human Machine Interfaces (“HMIs”). The applications at station level can be configured according to the substation layout and the specifications of the customer respective the operator.
Protection and control devices of the SA system close to the process can generate events, warnings and alarm signals which can be sent to the station level devices for logging, archiving and evaluation. In case of disturbances, for example, an operator in charge has to investigate what has happened when and at which location in the system, based on the available information. For this purpose alarm evaluation applications can provide some sort of support to the operator.
Filters configurable according to alarm and event lists to filter out certain aspects can be used, for example, alarms of a bay, a specific switch or transformer, or a specific secondary equipment device or function. These filters can rely on the limited information available in the event and alarm lists like the names of the objects at which the alarm happened. Filter category properties like priorities, alarm classes etc., which can be engineered for each signal or signal type can also be used.
The system alarm state can include sum alarms at different hierarchical levels, which can allow an identification of the location or function of the switch yard or secondary system where the problem has occurred. This can include manually pre-engineered alarm hierarchies according to switch yard structure and different functional categories like switch yard, protection, control, communication system, with sum alarms defined according to the switch yard structure, for example, at substation, voltage level, bay and equipment level. Such hierarchical alarm structure can enable the operator to gain an overview on the alarm situation at a higher level and to proceed downwards to the interesting lower levels, however, the hierarchical alarm structure can be configured individually for each substation at signal or signal type level, for example, for each alarm signal, the assignment of the functional category can be performed manually.
For example, SA systems based on IEC 61850 can be configured and described by means of a standardized configuration representation or formal system description called Substation Configuration Description (SCD). For example, an SCD file can include the logical data flow between the IEDs and the relation between the IEDs as well as the functionality which the IEDs can execute on behalf of the substation. In addition to SA systems for substations in high and medium-voltage power networks, other process control systems for, for example, hydro power plants, wind power systems, and Distributed Energy Resources (DER), can be described by a formal system description at least partly identical to the IEC 61850 SA description.
EP-A 2264967 is an interface description or structure of an inter-bay SA application. The interface of the application to other elements of the SA system, for example, to a bay controller, IED, OPC server, HMI, and/or gateway, can be used in order to fully automate inter-bay SA application configuration and implementation. A formal description or structure of the base SA system as for example, included in an IEC 61850 SCD file can be used to generate a formal description of the interfaces of the inter-bay SA application to be engineered, for example, to structure the interface data into Logical Nodes according to IEC 61850. The structure of the base SA system can be connected to the process single line diagram and integrated into the SCD file of the base SA system, thereby generating an enhanced SCD file. The interface-level Logical Nodes can include control blocks and data set definitions that together define the data flow within the application, for example, the communication links between the IED that hosts the interface function block and the IED hosting a basic SA functionality assigned to substation constituents on a hierarchically lower level. For example, this data flow can be engineered automatically by a separate application engineering wizard, or a component of a system engineering tool.